Is Block Chain Something New Worth Watching?

An important part of every meeting with our National “BILT” (Business and Industry Leadership Team) is the “trends discussion.” That’s the time when BILT members discuss the current state of the IT industry, in terms both of today’s challenges and tomorrow’s tools. At a recent BILT meeting, block chain technology was mentioned. Glenn Wintrich, an innovation leader at Dell, suggested that block chain – also called a distributed database – is something IT educators should watch in the month and years ahead. There may soon be widespread applications of the technology beyond Bitcoin, the product that’s most closely associated with block chain.

Glenn shared with the National Convergence Technology Center a short article from Shaping Tomorrow that discusses the future of block chain. Aside from the provocative statement that “Bitcoin will do for payments what email did for communication,” the article suggests block chain will soon find a home in law enforcement, government elections, cybersecurity, and the internet of things.

Tech news site Recode.net recently published a similar article that quotes one Silicon Valley venture capitalist who believes block chain could be the most important invention since the Internet. The article suggests that controversy and complexity of Bitcoin hides the fact that block chain is a model that works extremely well in maintaining accurate and anonymous records. Since every Internet transaction relies on systems of trust (you trust the bank to give you an accurate account balance, you trust the email server to send you messages, you trust your identity and privacy will be protected) that can be hacked. Block chain could change all of that with what author Mike Gault calls “distributed consensus.” And that gets you the kind of accurate, secure records of digital transactions and data sets that would never be possible in the physical.

You can also learn more at Gizmodo.